C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Alexander Smith
A man can bear a world’s contempt when he has that within which says he’s worthy. When he contemns himself, there burns the hell.
A man’s real possession is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.
A poem round and perfect as a star.
A single soul is richer than all the worlds.
A tender sadness drops upon my soul, like the soft twilight dropping on the world.
An old novel has a history of its own.
And winter, that grand old harper, smote his thunder-harp of pines.
As a wild maiden, with love-drinking eyes, sees in sweet dreams a beaming youth of glory.
Death is the ugly fact which Nature has to hide, and she hides it well.
Eternity doth wear upon her face the veil of time. They only see the veil, and thus they know not what they stand so near!
Every day travels toward death; the last only arrives at it.
Everything is sweetened by risk.
Fame, next grandest word to God!
God has thickly strewn infinity with grandeur.
God is a worker. He has thickly strewn infinity with grandeur. God is love; He yet shall wipe away Creation’s tears, and all the worlds shall summer in His smile. Why work I not? the veriest mote that sports its one-day life within the sunny beam has its stern duties.
Good humor and generosity carry the day with the popular heart all the world over.
Happiness never lays its finger on its pulse. If we attempt to steal a glimpse of its features it disappears.
I clasp thy waist, I feel thy bosom’s beat—oh, kiss me into faintness sweet and dim!
If the egotist is weak, his egotism is worthless. If the egotist is strong, acute, full of distinctive character, his egotism is precious, and remains a possession of the race.
If we were to live here always, with no other care than how to feed, clothe, and house ourselves, life would be a very sorry business. It is immeasurably heightened by the solemnity of death.
If you wish to preserve your secret, wrap it up in frankness.
It is characteristic of pleasure that we can never recognize it to be pleasure till after it is gone.
It is not of so much consequence what you say, as how you say it.
It was his nature to blossom into song, as it is a tree’s to leaf itself in April.
Men praise poverty, as the African worships Mumbo Jumbo—from terror of the malign power, and a desire to propitiate it.
Pleasure has no logic; it never treads in its own footsteps.
Pride’s chickens have bonny feathers, but they are an expensive brood to rear. They eat up everything, and are always lean when brought to market.
Some books are drenched sands, on which a great soul’s wealth lies all in heaps, like a wrecked argosy.
Speak no harsh words of earth; she is our mother, and few of us her sons who have not added a wrinkle to her brow.
Style, after all, rather than thought, is the immortal thing in literature.
The garrulous sea is talking to the shore; let us go down and hear the graybeard’s speech.
The great man is the man who does a thing for the first time.
The greatness of an artist or a writer does not depend on what he has in common with other artists and writers, but on what he has peculiar to himself.
The man who in this world can keep the whiteness of his soul is not likely to lose it in any other.
The only thing a man knows is himself.
The pale child, Eve, leading her mother, Night.
The truly great rest in the knowledge of their own deserts, nor seek the conformation of the world.
There is no ghost so difficult to lay as the ghost of an injury.
Thoughts must come naturally, like wild-flowers; they cannot be forced in a hot-bed, even although aided by the leaf-mould of your past.
To bring the best human qualities to anything like perfection, to fill them with the sweet juices of courtesy and charity, prosperity, or, at all events, a moderate amount of it, is required,—just as sunshine is needed for the ripening of peaches and apricots.
To have to die is a distinction of which no man is proud.
To-day is always different from yesterday.
Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of mortal life.
Vanity in its idler moments is benevolent, is as willing to give pleasure as to take it, and accepts as sufficient reward for its services a kind word or an approving smile.
We are never happy: we can only remember that we were so once.
We bury love; forgetfulness grows over it like grass; that is a thing to weep for, not the dead.
We have two lives: the soul of man is like the rolling world, one half in day, the other dipt in night; the one has music and the flying cloud, the other silence and the wakeful stars.
Winter does not work only on a broad scale; he is careful in trifles.
Yet through all, we know this tangled skein is in the hands of One who sees the end from the beginning; He shall yet unravel all.